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QED - You can read the whole passage here

We begin with light. When Newton started looking at light, the first
thing he found was that white light is a mixture of colors. He separated
white light with a prism into various colors, but when he put light of
one color—red, for instance - through another prism, he found it could
not be separated further. So Newton found that white light is a mixture
of different colors, each of which is pure in the sense that it can't be
separated further.

When I say "light" in these lectures, I don't
mean simply the light we can see, from red to blue. It turns out that
visible light is just a part of a long scale that's analogous to a
musical scale in which there are notes higher than you can hear and
other notes lower than you can hear. The scale of light can be described
by numbers—called the frequency—and as the numbers get higher, the
light goes from red to blue to violet to ultraviolet. We can't see
ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. Its still
light— only the number is different. (We shouldn't be so provincial:
what we can detect directly with our own instrument, the eye, isn't the
only thing in the world!) If we continue simply to change the number, we
go out into X-rays, gamma rays, and so on. If we change the number in
the other direction, we go from blue to red to infrared (heat) waves,
then television waves and radio waves. For me, all of that is "light"
I'm going to use just red light for most of my examples, but the theory
of quantum electrodynamics extends over the entire range that I have
described.

Newton thought that light was made up of particles --
he called them "corpuscles" -- and he was right (but the reasoning that
he used to come to that decision was erroneous). We know that light is
made of particles because we can take a very sensitive instrument that
makes clicks when light shines on it, and if the light gets dimmer, the
clicks remain just as loud -- there are just fewer of them. Thus light
is something like raindrops -- each little lump of light is called a
photon -- and if the light is all one color, all the "raindrops" are the
same size.

The human eye is a very good instrument: it takes only about five or six
photons to activate a nerve cell and send a message to the brain. If we
were evolved a little further so we could see ten times more
sensitively, we wouldn't have to have this discussion -- we would all
have seen very dim light of one color as a series of intermittent little
flashes of equal intensity.

You might wonder how it is possible
to detect a single photon. One instrument that can do this is called a
photomultiplier, and I'll describe briefly how it works: When a photon
hits a metal plate A at the bottom (see Figure 1), it causes an electron
to break loose from one of the atoms in the plate. The free electron is
strongly attracted to plate B (which has a positive charge on it) and
hits it with enough force to break loose three or four electrons. Each
of the electrons knocked out of plate B is attracted to plate C (which
is also charged), and their collision with plate C knocks loose even
more electrons. This process is repeated ten or twelve times, until
billions of electrons, enough to make a sizable electrical current, hit
the last plate, L. This current can be amplified by a regular amplifier
and sent through a speaker to make audible clicks. Each time a photon of
a given color hits the photomultiplier, a click of uniform loudness is
heard.

If you put a whole lot of photomultipliers around and let some very dim
light shine in various directions, the light goes into one multiplier or
another and makes a click of full intensity. IT is all or nothing: if
one photomultiplier goes off at a given moment, none of the others goes
off at the same moment (except in the rare instance that two photons
happened to leave the light source at the same time). There is no
splitting of light into "half particles" that go different places. I
want to emphasize that light comes in this form -— particles. It is very
important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for
those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told
something about light behaving like waves. I'm telling you the way it
does behave like particles.

You might say that it's just the
photomultiplier that detects light as particles, but no, every
instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak
light has always ended up discovering the same thing: light is made of
particles.I am going to assume that you are familiar with the properties of light
in everyday circumstances — things like, light goes in straight lines;
it bends when it goes into water; when it is reflected from a surface
like a mirror, the angle at which the light hits the surface is equal to
the angle at which it leaves the surface; light can be separated into
colors; you can see beautiful colors on a mud puddle when there is a
little bit of oil on it; a lens focuses light, and so on. I am going to
use these phenomena that you are familiar with in order to illustrate
the truly strange behavior of light; I am going to explain these
familiar phenomena in terms of the theory of quantum electrodynamics. I
told you about the photomultiplier in order to illustrate an essential
phenomenon that you may not have been familiar with—that light is made
of particles -- but by now, I hope you are familiar with that, too!

Now,
I think you are all familiar with the phenomenon that light is partly
reflected from some surfaces, such as water. Many are the romantic
paintings of moonlight reflecting from a lake (and many are the times
you got your- self in trouble because of moonlight reflecting from a
lake!). When you look down into water you can see what's below the
surface (especially in the daytime), but you can also see a reflection
from the surface. Glass is another example: if you have a lamp on in the
room and you're looking out through a window during the daytime, you
can see things outside through the glass as well as a dim reflection of
the surface of glass.

Before I go on, I want you to be aware of a
simplification I am going to make that I will correct later on: When I
talk about the partial reflection of light by glass, I am going to
pretend that the light is reflected by only the surface of the glass. In
reality, a piece of glass is a terrible monster of complexity—huge
numbers of electrons are jiggling about. When a photon comes down, it interacts with electrons throughout the glass, not just on the surface. The photon and electrons do some kind of dance, the net result of which is the same as if the photon hit only the surface. So let me make that simplification for a while. Later on, I'll show you what actually happens inside the glass so you can understand why the result is the same.Now I'd like to describe an experiment, and tell you its surprising
results. In this experiment some photons of the same color—let's say,
red light—are emitted from a light source (see Fig. 2) down toward a
block of glass. A photomultiplier is placed at A, above the glass, to
catch any photons that are reflected by the front surface. To measure
how many photons get past the front surface, another photomultiplier is
placed at B, inside the glass. Never mind the obvious difficulties of
putting a photomultiplier inside block of glass; what are the results of
this experiment?

For every 100 photons that go straight down
toward the glass at 90°, an average of 4 arrive at A and 96 arrive at B.
So "partial reflection" in this case means that 4% of the photons are
reflected by the front surface of the glass, while the other 96% are
transmitted. Already we are in great difficulty: how can light be PARTLY
reflected? Each photon ends up at A or B -- how does the photon "make
up its mind" whether it should go to A or B? (Audience laughs.) That may
sound like a joke, but we can't just laugh; we're going to have to
explain that in terms of a theory! Partial reflection is already a deep
mystery, and it was a very difficult problem for Newton.

There are several possible theories that you could make up to account
for the partial reflection of light by glass One of them is that 96% of
the surface of the glass is "holes" that let the light through, while
the other 4% of the surface is covered by small "spots" of reflective
material (see Fig 3). Newton realized that this is not a possible
explanation (See Footnote 1). In just a moment we will encounter a
strange feature of partial reflection that will drive you crazy it you
try to stick to a theory of "holes and spots" -- or to any other
reasonable theory!

Another
possible theory is that the photons have some kind of internal
mechanism -- "wheels" and "gears" inside that are turning in some way—so
that when a photon is "aimed" just right, it goes through the glass,
and when its not aimed right, it reflects. We can check this theory
trying to filter out the photons that are not aimed right by putting a
few extra layers of glass between the source and the first layer of
glass. After going through the filters, the photons reaching the glass
should ALL be aimed right, and none of them should reflect. The trouble
with that theory is, it doesn't agree with experiment: even after going
through many layers of glass, 4% of the photons reaching a given surface
reflect off it.

Try as we might to invent a reasonable theory that can explain how a
photon "makes up its mind" whether to go through glass or bounce back,
it is impossible to predict which way a given photon will go.
Philosophers have said that if the same circumstances don't always
produce the same results, predictions are impossible and science will
collapse. Here is a circumstance -— identical photons are always coming
down in the same direction to the same piece of glass -— that produces
different results. We cannot predict whether a given photon will arrive
at A or B. All we can predict is that out of 100 photons that come down,
an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface. Does this mean
that physics, a science of great exactitude, has been reduced to
calculating only probability of an event, and not predicting exactly
what will happen? Yes. That's a retreat, but that's the way it is:
Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not
collapsed.